Interstellar object exploded over Earth in 2014, declassified govmt data reveal
livescience.com
livescience.com
What is still bloody incredible. That would be a rotation around planet Earth every 2,2 minutes. Or make it to the Moon in 21 minutes.
Lastly, something that this paper doesn't address. There is a chance that the object was local to our solar system but had been 'flung' out onto an escape trajectory. Our solar system is a giant multi-body problem. Things can be flung out into space. This rock might have been accelerated to escape velocity by our moon or some other body. So rather than an interstellar object, it may have been a local rock on its way out that just happened to hit earth before leaving the solar system.
As for the idea that this 2014 object originated in our solar system: I don't think that's possible. They were able to project it's incoming trajectory and there were no significant masses that could have directed it path from anywhere other than interstellar space. This is pretty clear from the paper.
I absolutely love being alive right now. A Higgs boson! Confirmed objects from outside our solar system! A real life picture of a black hole! We’re just at the start of being able to learn these things, and it’s getting better by the year. I love it.
Conspiracy answer:
The alien probe launched 10,000 years ago just determined that either:
1) Our atmosphere is sufficiently thick to cause the object to disintegrate over seconds instead of instantaneously, meaning there’s enough raw gaseous material to be interesting, or
2) We have an active defense system, meaning the local inhabitants are smart enough to be interesting.
In 46 years, when the light reaches its origin around 26 Draconis, observations will be recorded, reports will be filed, and plans will be made.
1. Send probe to star system slow enough to be random interstellar rock on a collision course with planetary body,
2. it collects data as it approaches body,
3. then have it self-destruct in the atmo destroying all technology and information in the probe. Use the energy from the destruction to send a message back on a wide cone that can be intercepted.
After all some random ham in 2005 set a record of 13M miles per watt. That's in 2005, with an standard radio (elecraft k1) and not any exotic receivers like say something 100-1000x better than the JWST that's I'd expect earth to have over the next few decades, let alone some other civilization that's sending sensors to likely millions of solar systems if they found us.
That's only 400kw for a light year, not that much assuming you are slinging sensors into other solar systems.
You can focus more of that power into a particular area, but the fundamentals here are not particularly negotiable.
If aliens intend to invade over resources, the cost of such an invasion (from an energy consumption perspective) is so prohibitively high, that harvesting from a closer body seems way more feasible.
If aliens intend to invade over not resources, but some other factor, then we cannot guess it. May be there's what amounts to religion and the invasion is a defacto purging or converting of alien species over to their "god". Or to exterminate any possible future competition (aka, darwinianism at the galactic scale).
How do we know that traveling closer in the same time takes less energy than traveling further? We can't assume that anymore.
And so on. This is my problem with most sci-fi. They take some crazy assumptions and ignore most of the consequences so the world is recognizable.
This is like people in ancient Greece hearing that one city in 21st century has more population than the whole world in their time and wondering how we feed our horses :)
I'm not sure capture would necessarily be all that likely. Assuming a flyby and not a crash, capturing a probe would require the captor to accelerate to the probe's relative velocity first. If you wanted to bring it back, too, you'd then have to decelerate back into a non-escape velocity with the captive in tow.
Alternatively, you'd need some way of slowing the probe down without touching it, e.g. with light, but doing that would take a rather long time, especially if it wasn't designed as a light sail intended to be slowed down and you don't want to destroy the probe in the process.
Both sound quite nontrivial especially if the probe is travelling at a speed that would be useful for interstellar travel, and if you don't detect the probe a lot in advance, which also sounds nontrivial. If the target world had reached such an advanced technology level that the probe could be detected and deemed interesting early on and captured, all bets would be off anyway.
> Use the energy from the destruction to send a message back on a wide cone that can be intercepted.
Energy from destruction tends not to be very organized. How would you use that energy for sending a coherent directed message that isn't even known in advance (assuming it would actually transmit some of the newly collected data and not just "bye bye")?
This is a really good point. If you can make your probe fast enough you reduce warning time and make it very expensive to catch.
> Energy from destruction tends not to be very organized. How would you use that energy for sending a coherent directed message that isn't even known in advance (assuming it would actually transmit some of the newly collected data and not just "bye bye")?
I was assuming a signal that could not be distinguished from an explosion much like how cryptography can encrypt a message that without the key can not be distinguished from random noise.
If one wanted to get really deniable about this you could just design a rock such that its shape and composition would reveal facts about the planets atmosphere based purely on how it explodes, e.g. the wave lengths of the light of an explosion vary based on oxygen content. If the rock doesn't explode on schedule you could conclude with some probability intelligent life intercepted it for study.
This gives me Douglas Adams vibes, thinking about an alien species posting plans to invade Earth. "The plans were on display for months" [1]
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/40705-but-the-plans-were-on...
The 'final' was meant as a sly dig at Eoin Colfer's addition to the series, "And Another Thing", which attempted to wrap up the story after Adams' death. I read it shortly after release and didn't give it a fair chance.
“Should we report this?”
“You really want to do all that paperwork?”
“Bulldozer it is.”
This quote is about planning an interstellar invasion: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5942504-the-mighty-ships-to...
Also:
- The ion thrusters were small enough to completely disintegrate on impact/reentry.
- Oumuamua was the mother ship, clearly.
Oumuamua was the mass ejected to decelerate.
Mother ship due in 10-20 years.
Not to mention if you are slinging probes into other solar systems you likely could send 1000x into each one, so if a few miss, not big deal.
We need better detection and defenses. And another planet. ASAP.
> Some of the sensors that detect fireballs are operated by the U.S. Department of Defense, which uses the same technologies to monitor the skies for nuclear detonations. As a result, Siraj and Loeb couldn’t directly confirm the margin of error on the fireball’s velocity.
Also the coincidence of it impacting earth and not Jupiter or any other planetary body or just wizzing by is blowing my mind. Of course we have more sensors around earth so that makes sense but still. I would have thought we would’ve seen something similar to Oumououa prior to this.
That's mostly just because we don't notice 1.5ft wide rocks in space unless they do something interesting like hit our atmosphere
Can anyone say what percentage of the speed of light that is?
Speed of light: 670,616,629mph
= 0.00019385144% the speed of light
It's very likely that there's interstellar material already on earth from before we were able to detect the impact though, right? Question for the astrophysicists, is there something in the composition of objects that can tell us if something is interstellar in origin?
Share of isotopes.
- Isotopic analyze at Earth begins countdown from Sun system events, but events on other stars have other timeline and their star also will have other share.
Sun is not rare star, but our neighbors stars mostly different.
Plus, some of material appear from Novas and Supernovas (it is very like fingerprint of nuke - highly depend on technology available at place where it built and from raw materials from which it built), and it will also be different for thing traveled from other star.
Only problem, is that large part of this technology is classified, so scientists will have problems on every step, and some things will be opened to all only in few decades.
And most such objects appear above equatorial locations (because originated from Galaxy plane), where not much science institutions exists.
This extrasolar thing hit the Earth at 200km/h+.
Remember that the kinetic energy formula = 0.5 * m * v²
Is the velocity squared that means something very small can still wipe out an entire city in a gigantic fireball with little to no warning and ability to do anything about it. This is a very big deal for the people looking at things like asteroid defense at civilization time scales.
Yes, exactly.
On Russian astronomy forums where discussion, in which decided, such thing could be planetary scale weapon.
That's why many smart people think, that tries to contact extraterrestrial civilizations are extremely dangerous for humanity.
Stuff from outside is a lot rarer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity#List_of_escape...
BTW interesting, that on some places in Sun system, difference of 2nd and 3rd speeds is much less.
So a bit too small to hold baby Kal-El.